UK - Now well into its ninth decade of technical innovation, RG Jones Sound Engineering returned to Glastonbury for the eleventh consecutive year to support headliners Stormzy, The Killers, and The Cure on the Pyramid Stage, and to extend its expertise to the Genosys Stage and the new IICON stage at Block9, and a reconfigured West Holts stage. RG Jones has enhanced the Pyramid Stage since 2007 in one of the longest uninterrupted runs of audio services of any sound company at Glastonbury in recent times. The 18-strong on-site team, headed up by production manager Ben Milton with production engineer Mark Isbister on stage, collectively brought to the largest green field festival in the world a wealth of expertise in delivering audio to an extremely large crowd under notoriously challenging climatic conditions. The main aim of the system design, developed by festival soun
Saudi Arabia - Called upon by event producer Maestro Group to light the King Cup Final in Riyadh, lighting designer Koert Vermeulen used the versatility of a rig exclusively from Vari-Lite, a Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) entertainment lighting brand, to deliver his stadium-scale design. His creation utilised 350 Vari-Lite fixtures, including 100 of the new VL10 BeamWash and 100 fixtures from the LED-based VLZ range. The King Cup, the highlight of the Saudi soccer season, was held in May at Riyadh’s King Fahd International Stadium. The event included three separate shows - a five-minute pre-match entertainment, a 17-minute half-time show, and a post-show entertainment featuring an hour-long set by Saudi popstar, Rabeh Sager. Vermeulen, of Belgium-based consultancy ACTLD, is no stranger to the challenges of designing on a stadium scale, and the variety of demands it makes
UK - Esports Championship Series (ECS) Season 7, the latest iteration of the world’s most-watched CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) tournament, took place earlier this year, culminating in a four-day final in June at The SSE Arena, Wembley, London. The 16 groups that started the event were gradually reduced to four teams, which then battled through a knock-out competition to determine the season’s champions. The tournament was run by FACEIT, the competitive gaming platform for online multiplayer PvP gamers, which boasts more than eight million users and 12m online gaming sessions each month. disguise rental and studio partner, Bluman Associates, was commissioned by FACEIT to provide a 4K video display solution and management for the event. Bluman Associates have a disguise rental fleet including gx 1, gx 2 and solo servers - as well as the newest addition
Singapore - Ayrton MagicBlade-FX and Mistral spot luminaires were recently supplied to the Church of Our Saviour in Singapore by Ayrton’s exclusive local distributor, Total Solution Marketing Pte. The Ayrton fixtures were chosen for a number of reasons, as technical director, Ron Chiam, explains: “Because we only have a small space, we needed fixtures that were small and compact, but at the same time powerful enough to create a vibrant atmosphere. It was the first time we had heard about Ayrton, but soon realised that these were the fixtures to go for in the space that we had. They are used during moments of worship and are also used to create 3D-like lighting for our camera crew, so that they can capture what is on and off stage with ease. “We have four MagicBlade-FXs rigged up on our flybars in a V-shape, so that we can fan them out to create some eye candy ef
UK - one thousand six hundred fans descended on the Indigo at the O2 to enjoy a Sri Lankan ‘pop’ music show. This event, designed to provide an essence of Sri Lankan music was headed up by Palinda Samarasinghe from Lankan Imaginative & Foremost Events. Ruary Macphie, touring project manager from Matrix UK Solutions (Matrix) ensured the correct equipment was supplied to fully enhance and deliver the content on the show. Overseen by Ruary, the team performed a thorough pre-show check of all the show equipment, an opportunity to modify, prep and test the video equipment - this took place in the warehouse of parent company Anna Valley. At this stage, the team ingested the Sri Lankan filmed footage and programmed it to 55 tracks. Ruary comments, “It is essential to pre-rig and thoroughly test show equipment – this takes place as a given for all our events. Howev
Europe - Creative Technology (CT) first became involved in professional golf over 30 years ago, since then the company has steadily built its relationship with the European Tour providing AV technology at numerous tournaments throughout Europe, the Middle East and into Asia and Australia. CT has been appointed approved supplier to the Tour in recognition of their long-term engagement. The European Tour, headquartered at Wentworth in Surrey, manages the majority of premier golf tournaments across Europe and the Middle East, including the Ryder Cup on its four-yearly visit to Europe. Dave Crump, CEO of CT in Europe & the Middle East commented, “Creative Technology has a long, proud and successful relationship with golf in Europe providing LED screens to around 40 events per year and having been involved in every European Ryder Cup since 1985.” LED screens h
UK - Matilda The Musical followed its successful run in London’s West End by embarking on a major international tour, opening in South Africa and presently in Asia Pacific. The Roald Dahl inspired award-winning musical from the Royal Shakespeare Company tells the story of an extraordinary little girl who changes her own destiny. Associate lighting designer Chris Hirst has been working alongside original LD Hugh Vanstone, and with the latter’s consent, has developed a more LED-centric inventory, scaling down the number of fixtures and making it easier for him, and production technician Fraser Hall to tour with. Much of the inventory, supplied by Hawthorn, is based on Martin by Harman moving heads including quantities of Martin MAC Encore Performance CLD, Martin MAC Encore Wash CLD and Martin MAC Aura XB, exclusively distributed in the UK by Sound Technology.
UK - White Light has once again supplied the lighting equipment for the entire Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre season, which recently culminated in a revival of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Evita. Established in 1932, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is one of the largest theatres in London. Situated in a Royal Park, both its stage and auditorium are entirely uncovered and every year it hosts a season of bold and dynamic productions. This year was no exception, with productions of Our Town, Hansel and Gretel and A Midsummer Night’s Dream all achieving critical acclaim. The final show of the season was Evita which was directed by Jamie Lloyd, designed by Soutra Gilmour and lit by Oliver Award-winner Jon Clark. Jon explains: “Soutra and Jamie chose to set Evita on a dilapidated seating bleacher, which to al
Italy - Soul star John Legend performed on 25 July at the Greek Theatre of Taormina, Sicily. It was Legend's only European exhibition, accompanied for the occasion by a 100-piece orchestra. The event was lit up by186 DTS projectors (Raptor, NRG 1401, Brick, Katana, and Wonder). “The atmosphere of the Greek Theater of Taormina was beautiful,” said Nicola Mongi, lighting project manager. “DTS projectors, supplied through Madema Italia, integrated well with that unique place; in addition to their brightness and colour quality, the choice of DTS projectors was perfect because they are all very compact and lightweight, the right fit for the stage space – 2300 years old – that is obviously to be treated with the utmost care and does not allow for cumbersome installations. “I am really happy with the result. The audience and the production were enthusiastic
Sweden - The country’s largest fixed installation of Nexo’s STM Series modular line array has been completed at the Konserthus of Västerås, a city about 100km to the west of Stockholm. Designed and supplied by the Bright Group, the system includes several Nexo models, and is “a state-of-the-art solution for a busy modern performance environment”. With more than 200 events a year, including folk and world music, dance and new circus, pop and rock, jazz, chamber and orchestral performances, drama and comedy, the Västerås Konserthus is a buzzing cultural centre for its community. Its principal venue is The Great Hall, with its capacity for 900, and two wraparound balconies seating 215 and 125 people respectively. The team at the theatre, led by stage technical manager Per Andersson, conducted an exhaustive tender process involving nine well-known suppliers and
Argentina - Berlin-based creative studio battleROYAL recently drew on the power of Green Hippo’s Hippotizer Media Servers to provide a ‘dazzling product experience’ at a corporate event in Buenos Aires devised for a financial services provider. The new Platinum Corporate card by American Express was the motivation for this creation, directed by battleROYAL’s Brendan Shelper and conceived and produced with Ogilvy Argentina and NA Producionnes. The show, part entertainment and part art installation, was played to 200 guests facing the open sides of a 7m x 11m stage. Upstage, projection surfaces covered the rear two sides of the performance area, forming the setting for a story told through the interplay of human movement, tracking projections and light. “battleROYAL continually create new ways to integrate technology into their performances,” says UK-based vi
Croatia - HUST has completed the design and installation of sound systems throughout the new Grand Park Hotel Rovinj, using a combination of Community and Apart loudspeakers with Biamp control. This five-star 209-room hotel enjoys a stunning setting on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, with views of the old town, islands and sea. With over 40 separate zones, the Grand Park Hotel Rovinj’s audiovisual systems can be controlled and monitored via an intuitive GUI on any computer within the hotel network, or via separate wall-mounted digital OLED controllers located strategically throughout the complex. Twelve choices of music genre are available in any zone via the streaming service. A central feature of the hotel is its grand ballroom with stunning views of the city of Rovinj. The hotel also has three multifunctional/lecture halls, which can be divided or joined in various
USA - Each year since 1979, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! festival takes place at the Prospect Park Bandshell. This year, the largely free event delivered 29 shows over 10 weeks, from June through August, to an estimated 175,000-plus people, featuring artists including Patti LaBelle, Liz Phair, Iron & Wine, Salif Keita and Bomba Estereo (free concerts), as well as The National and Courtney Barnett, and Father John Misty and Jason Isbell (ticketed double-bills). What was different this year was the sound: an L-Acoustics PA system was acquired and will now be an integral part of the event going forward into its fifth decade. “This was a big year for the event, its forty-first year,” says Brendon Boyd, of Boyd Design, the event’s production manager who was celebrating his 20th year with the festival, where he began as a lighting apprentice in 2000. “It took us a cou
Hungary - Szeged Sabadteri opera and music festival takes place annually across the city of Szeged, with a major feature being the diverse programme of lavish productions ranging from rock musicals to opera being staged in the vast central Dóm Square. This year’s futuristic treatment of Aida, where love is set against the backdrop of war, marked the 80th anniversary since the eponymous opera’s first 1939 staging at this striking venue. Complementing director Gergely Kesselyak’s use of high-tech LED and multimedia scenography, TiMax SoundHub with HARDCore FPGA spatial processing added a new level of vocal and orchestral sonic immersion to an audience of 8000 over two nights. Hungarian TiMax specialists Votec have managed the event’s audio for several years, but Votec international business manager, Otari Tsereteli, revealed, “For the first time we wer
France - The 12th Annual Natural Games Festival took place in Millau in June, bringing together the world’s leading competitors in eight outdoor pro/amateur competitions. On the programme were boulder climbing, freestyle kayaking, kayak boarder, acrobatic paragliding, slopestyle MTB, trial MTB, stand up paddle racing, highline and jumpline. A without limits sports playground, Millau has become the world capital of outdoor sports, and The Natural Games has established itself as the European leader in outdoor sports and music entertainment festivals. In addition to the exciting official competitions the event featured a brand village, free workshops, shows and live concerts. Lighting designer Jean-Charles Lacombe chose 12 Claypaky B-EYE K20s, provided by STE Audio, to illuminate the stage because he is very familiar with the lighting fixtures. “They completely meet m
UK - Southwest London venue Under the Bridge has benefited from the installation of a new LED wall as well as lighting and audio upgrades at its premises. “Since Under the Bridge launched in 2011, we’ve taken great pride being one of the UK’s most unique and technically-advanced, mid-sized, multi-purpose venues for hire,” says creative manager, Alan Tenenbaum. “With approximately 100 confirmed events scheduled to host for the remainder of 2019, we’re excited to share this production upgrade with our clients and audiences. The upgrade puts our intimate venue in a class of its own, beyond comparison.” The 3.9mm pixel-pitch LED screen from Absen supports a video resolution higher than Full HD (1080p), making it ideal for presentations, image projections and video content. The venue also has a new LED lighting rig, expanding the existing stock to offe
Poland - Rental and visual production company Transcolor has invested in 200 Robe Spiider LED wash beams. These have been added to their rental stock which currently owns several thousand lighting fixtures including around 1,000 Robe moving lights. The company was founded in 1992 by Lucjan Siwczyk and has enjoyed success and respect as it has become active in all areas of professional lighting and visuals, especially TV, film, touring and corporate / special events. The current facilities just outside Warsaw are the company’s headquarters. In addition to offices and warehouses, this includes five full-size studios and rehearsal rooms which are in constant use for television and movie productions, promo and advertising shots, production rehearsals and a wide range of other events. As a lot of their work is TV and film-based, the proper quality of colours i
USA - Craig Richter believes in coming out of the gate fast when lighting a concert. “When the first song hits, I like the audience to get a full immersion of sound and light all at once,” he says of his design approach. Richter’s philosophy was on full display recently when he lit Grammy-winning rockers Halestorm on their coheadline tour with Alice Cooper with a rig that featured 52 Chauvet Professional fixtures, supplied by Bandit Lites. “This is an intense, no-nonsense rock band, so I wanted our show to match that feeling in terms of its power and directness,” says Richter. “The overall idea was to create a big massive look. I always aim to give the crowd a wow moment multiple times during the show, but I also don’t want to distract from what the band is doing on stage. People paid to come see Halestorm not me. So, for this design I wanted an old-schoo
Canada - Acting as a hub for performing arts in Winnipeg, the Centennial Concert Hall has long upheld a sense of community for the people of Manitoba. With a seating capacity in excess of 2,300, the venue is the largest performing arts space in Winnipeg. When Centennial Hall decided to upgrade its lighting system to improve energy efficiency and coverage, ArcSystem stood out as a top choice. The outdated system at Centennial Hall was causing multiple problems for the staff, patrons, and performers. On top of poor lighting quality, the old system required excessive maintenance. Denis Crymble, stage electrician at Centennial Hall, says, “I never liked the feeling of the light. To me, it was always dingy. The upkeep of it was horrendous. We had little to no flexibility in the old space.” For decades, the venue had few technology upgrades. Looking to the future, the Ce
Russia - The Sound Line Agency received its first Clair Brothers speakers in the form of the 1.5AM stage monitors. For its production needs, Sound Line purchased several Clair Brothers components, including the kiTCurve12 system, 8CX front-fills, 1.5AM stage monitors, i218-Ms and CS218-Ms. “This was my company’s first experience working with Clair Brothers gear, but I had heard such positive feedback from musicians who’d had direct experience with the American brand that I already had high expectations,” explains Andrey Kabanov, owner of Sound Line Agency. “Back in 2005 I had the pleasure of seeing a Sting concert in Moscow where Clair Brothers loudspeakers were used. Since then, I’ve never heard another system of equal quality. The problem in those days was this incredible equipment was exclusive and not readily available to companies like mine.”
USA - Harman Professional Solutions celebrated the grand opening of The Reach at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. The opening of The Reach marks the first new construction at The Kennedy Centre since its opening in 1971, and is comprised of three contiguous pavilions creating 72,000sq.ft of interior space, 4.6 acres of green space and gardens, and a pedestrian bridge over Rock Creek Parkway that connects the Kennedy Centre to Washington, DC’s other memorials. The centre describes The Reach as “a home for non-traditional programming with an emphasis on active participation and access. The open, informal spaces of the new expansion draw visitors directly into the creative process and inspire new connections and collaborations between creators of multiple genres and disciplines.” “We are very proud of our decades-old rela
USA - Hard rock band Chevelle has embarked on a summer amphitheatre tour across North America, co-headlining with Breaking Benjamin and lit by Ayrton Khamsin LED profile fixtures. Chevelle has sold over four million albums in the US and has a new record forthcoming in 2020. Production designer, Robb Jibson of Chicago-based So Midwest was searching for a 1000W LED fixture, with a shuttering mechanism that could close completely over itself in one direction. He held a shoot-out featuring ‘the top contenders’ in the category. “While all the fixtures we tested did a good job, Khamsin was the most well-engineered, the most well-polished of the group,” Jibson reports. “Its optics, clarity and perceived brightness won out. I also liked its edge sharpness, the flatness of the field and the way it physically looked.” Bandit Lites, Chevelle’s lighting vendor, invested i
France - In Paris on 4 July, Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist Ahmed Jamal performed the world premiere of his album Ballades at The Louis Vuitton Foundation, a glass-clad, Frank Gehry-designed building that takes the form of a boat’s sails. Enhancing the dramatic impact of the moment was a lighting display by Puzzle SA that featured eight Chauvet Professional Rogue R1 FX-B fixtures. Arranged in an oval-like pattern behind centre-stage, their independently controlled moving heads pointing in multiple directions, the Rogue fixtures created beguiling geometric patterns that not only reflected Jamal’s music, but also harmonized with the large angular glass sails. Seemingly pointing in every direction at once as they reach for the sky, the building’s 12 glass sails work with its other features like the prismatic yellow columns by Danish artist Olafur Eliasso
UK/USA - Pink’s Beautiful Trauma world tour started in North America in March 2018 and is set to conclude this November on the same continent. The tour, in support of the singer’s seventh studio album, Beautiful Trauma, will have taken in 157 dates across 18 countries in North and South America, Europe and Australasia. This included a weekend of sold-out shows at London's Wembley Stadium, where 150,000 fans gathered to see the rock/pop starlet dazzle with her vocals and gymnastic skills. Working in conjunction with its family of partners Clair Global and JPJ Audio, Britannia Row successfully delivered a worldwide audio feat. Britannia Row’s Dave Compton says: “Once again, we’ve really enjoyed working with Pink’s team. It’s been an amazingly popular worldwide tour where the artist and engineers have given it their all across a multit
